The Cultural Life of Machine Learning:

An Incursion into Critical AI Studies

Jonathan Roberge
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The Cultural Life
of Machine Learning
An Incursion into
Critical AI Studies
Edited by
Jonathan Roberge
Michael Castelle
The Cultural Life of Machine Learning
 Jonathan Roberge · Michael Castelle
Editors

The Cultural Life

of Machine Learning
An Incursion into Critical AI Studies
Editors
Jonathan Roberge Michael Castelle
Centre Urbanisation Culture Société Centre for Interdisciplinary
Institut national de la recherche Methodologies
scientifique University of Warwick
Quebec City, QC, Canada Coventry, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-56285-4 ISBN 978-3-030-56286-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56286-1

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 Contents

1 Toward an End-to-End Sociology of 21st-Century

Machine Learning 1
Jonathan Roberge and Michael Castelle

2 Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning: Why

It Became Thinkable and Preferable to Teach Machines
to Judge the World 31
Aaron Mendon-Plasek

3 What Kind of Learning Is Machine Learning? 79

Tyler Reigeluth and Michael Castelle

4 The Other Cambridge Analytics: Early “Artificial

Intelligence” in American Political Science 117
Fenwick McKelvey

5 Machinic Encounters: A Relational Approach

to the Sociology of AI 143
Ceyda Yolgörmez

v
vi CONTENTS

6 AlphaGo’s Deep Play: Technological Breakthrough

as Social Drama 167
Werner Binder

7 Adversariality in Machine Learning Systems: On Neural

Networks and the Limits of Knowledge 197
Théo Lepage-Richer

8 Planetary Intelligence 227

Orit Halpern

9 Critical Perspectives on Governance Mechanisms

for AI/ML Systems 257
Luke Stark, Daniel Greene, and Anna Lauren Hoffmann

Index 281
 Notes on Contributors

Werner Binder is an amateur Go player and an assistant professor for

sociology at the Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). After studies
in Mannheim, Potsdam, and Berlin, he earned his Ph.D. at the University
of Konstanz with a thesis on the Abu Ghraib Scandal. He is author of Abu
Ghraib und die Folgen (2013, Transcript), coauthor of Ungefähres (2014,
Velbrück), and coeditor of Kippfiguren (2013, Velbrück). He currently
works on the history and methodology of cultural sociology, on populist
discourses in Europe and the United States as well as on social imaginaries
in the field of digital technologies. Among his recent journal publications
are “Biography and Form of Life. Toward a Cultural Analysis of Narrative
Interviews” (2019, with Dmitry Kurakin, Sociológia—Slovak Sociological
Review) and “Social Imaginaries and the Limits of Differential Meaning.
A Cultural Sociological Critique of Symbolic Meaning Structures” (2019,
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie).
Michael Castelle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick’s
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and a Turing Fellow at the
Alan Turing Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University
of Chicago and a Sc.B. in Computer Science from Brown University. His
current research focuses on the social and historical epistemology of deep
learning, with an emphasis on its relationship to sociological and anthro-
pological theory. His previous dissertation work involved the history of

vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

transaction processing and messaging middleware in the context of finan-

cial exchanges, including implications for a contemporary understanding
of marketplace platforms and their regulation.
Daniel Greene is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the
University of Maryland. His research focuses on the future of work and
the fight to define that future in policy, culture, and code. His forth-
coming book from the MIT Press, The Promise of Access, draws on years of
ethnographic research to investigate how the problem of poverty became
a problem of technology, exploring the schools and libraries teaching
people to code, why they embrace that mission, and how it changes
them. Other research explores the design of surveillance systems such as
military drones, police body cameras, and human resources software. His
work has been published in venues such as New Media and Society, the
International Journal of Communication, and Research in the Sociology of
Work.
Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor at Concordia University in
Montréal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and
cybernetics with design and art practice. Her recent monograph, Beautiful
Data (Duke Press, 2015), is a history of interactivity, data visualization,
and ubiquitous computing. She also directs the Speculative Life Research
Cluster; a research lab working on media, infrastructure, and the Anthro-
pocene at the Milieux Institute for the Arts, Culture, and Technology.
Her next book is on extreme infrastructures, computation, ecology, and
the future of habitat. She has also published and created works for a variety
of venues including e-flux, Rhizome, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public
Culture, and ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Assistant Professor with The Information
School at the University of Washington. Her research is situated at the
intersections of data, technology, culture, and ethics, with particular atten-
tion to the ways in which the design and use of information technology
can promote or hinder the pursuit of important human values like respect
and justice. Her work has appeared in various scholarly journals like New
Media & Society, The Library Quarterly, and Information, Communica-
tion, & Society. Her writing has also appeared in popular outlets, including
The Guardian, The Seattle Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Théo Lepage-Richer is a Ph.D. Candidate and SSHRC/FRQ-SC
Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix

Brown University. His research is broadly concerned with the history and
epistemology of machine learning, with a specific focus on the transfor-
mation of neural networks from a model of the mind to a functional
framework for pattern extraction. Working at the intersection of media
studies and science & technology studies, he has published pieces on the
commodification of facial recognition as well as on issues of quantifica-
tion as they pertain to the projection of risk within individuals. Previously,
Théo has been a visiting scholar at Charles University and at the Digital
Democracies Group at Simon Fraser University.
Fenwick McKelvey is an Associate Professor in Information and
Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communica-
tion Studies at Concordia University. He studies the digital politics and
policy, appearing frequently as an expert commentator in the media and
intervening in media regulatory hearings. He is the author of Internet
Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed (University of Minnesota
Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He
is coauthor of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter
Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois. His research has
been published in journals including New Media and Society, the Inter-
national Journal of Communication, public outlets such as The Conver-
sation and Policy Options, and been reported by The Globe and Mail,
CBC The Weekly and CBC The National. He is also a member of the
Educational Review Committee of the Walrus Magazine.
Aaron Mendon-Plasek is a historian of science and technology, scholar,
and writer. A Ph.D. Candidate in History at Columbia University, Aaron
has a M.A. in History from Columbia, a M.A. in Humanities and Social
Thought from NYU, an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, and a B.S. in Physics and Astronomy and a B.A.
in Writing from Drake University. He lives in New York with his partner,
Sapna Mendon.
Tyler Reigeluth has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Université libre
de Bruxelles where he worked with the Algorithmic Governmentality
FNRS-funded research project. His dissertation problematized the notion
of behavior within contemporary machine learning by developing a
genealogy of its normative implications. After having carried out post-
doctoral positions at the Université du Québec à Montréal and at the
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

University of Chicago, he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Univer-

sité de Grenoble-Alpes’ Institute of Philosophy, within the framework of
the Ethics&AI Chair in the Multidisciplinary Institute of Artificial Intelli-
gence (MIAI). His research lies at the intersection of political theory and
philosophy of technology and has focused most recently on the normative
and epistemological relationships between learning, education, and tech-
nics. He co-edited the book De la ville intelligent à la ville intelligible
(2019).
Jonathan Roberge is an Associate Professor at the Institut National
de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) cross appointed to Urban Studies,
Cultural Studies, and Knowledge Mobilization. He funded the Nenic Lab
as part of his Canada Research Chair in 2012. He is a member of the
Chaire Fernand-Dumont sur la culture at INRS, the Centre interuniver-
sitaire sur la science et la technologie and the Laboratoire de Commu-
nication mediatisée par les ordinateurs at UQAM. He is among the first
scholars in Canada to have critically focused on algorithms and cultural
production. In 2014, he organized the first sociological conference on
this topic which culminated into a foundational text in this domain enti-
tled Algorithmic Cultures (Routledge, 2016, translated into German at
Transcript Verlag, 2017).
Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and
Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His work interrogates
the historical, social, and ethical impacts of computing and artificial intel-
ligence technologies, particularly those mediating social and emotional
expression. His work has appeared in scholarly journals including The
Information Society, Social Studies of Science, and New Media & Society,
and in popular venues like Slate, The Globe and Mail, and The Boston
Globe. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and
Communication at New York University.
Ceyda Yolgörmez is a Ph.D. candidate in Social and Cultural Analysis
Program at Concordia University. Her research looks at the socializa-
tion of AI agents through situated interactions in game contexts. She
studies game-playing AIs and focuses on the material-discursive condi-
tions through which specific articulations of their agencies emerge. She
is particularly interested in the histories of technologies and techniques
of AI that underline the attributions of agency. Alongside this, she thinks
about how AI and sociology could come together, how they would benefit
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

each other; and how new forms of intelligences could inform social theory
in a deep and meaningful way. A big part of this thinking deals with
uncertainty and error, and glitch, and their function in maintaining social
order, or bringing social change. She is coordinator of Machine Agencies
Research Group, and is member of Speculative Life Research Cluster, and
Technoculture, Arts and Games at Milieux Institute.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 First image of black hole, April 10, 2019 (Credit EHT
collaboration) 230
Fig. 8.2 March 13, 2017 High Altitude Sub millimeter wave array,
Alma Observatory, Chajnantor Plateau, Atacama, Chile.
Part of the EHT (Photo Orit Halpern) 233
Fig. 8.3 Photo: Orit Halpern 234
Fig. 8.4 March 23, 2017, Salar de Atacama, SQM fields (Photo Orit
Halpern) 239
Fig. 8.5 Dr. Alejandro Jofré presenting on real-time analytics
for decision making in extraction. March 21, 2017, CMM,
University of Chile, Santiago (Photo Orit Halpern) 243
Fig. 8.6 Dr. Alejandro Jofré presenting on real-time analytics
for decision making in extraction. March 21, 2017, CMM,
University of Chile, Santiago (Photo Orit Halpern) 244
Fig. 8.7 Calama Memorial for Pinochet Victims, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memorial_DDHH_Chile_06_
Memorial_en_Calama.jpg (Downloaded August 6, 2019) 247
Fig. 8.8 From Rosenblatt (1961) 249

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 The role of different developmental processes in a human

development framework and in a machine learning
“model development” approach 100
Table 4.1 Structure of the Simulmatics 1960 Model of the American
Electorate reproduced from the original 126
Table 4.2 Reproduced from Pool et al. (1964, p. 46) 128

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Toward an End-to-End Sociology

of 21st-Century Machine Learning

Jonathan Roberge and Michael Castelle

The world of contemporary machine learning (ML)—specifically in the

domain of the multilayered “deep” neural networks, generative adver-
sarial networks, differentiable programming, and related novelties in what
is known as artificial intelligence (AI)—poses difficulties for those in the
social sciences, like us, who wish to take its rich and varied phenomena
as objects of study. We want, ideally, to be able to offer timely contri-
butions to present-day, pressing debates regarding these technologies
and their impacts; but at the same time, we would like to make claims
that persist beyond the specific features of today’s (or yesterday’s) inno-
vations. The rapid pace of technical and institutional change in ML
today—in which researchers, practitioners, think tanks, and policymakers

J. Roberge
Centre Urbanisation Culture Société, Institut National de La Recherche
Scientifique, Quebec City, QC, Canada
e-mail: Jonathan.Roberge@UCS.INRS.Ca
M. Castelle (B)
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies,
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
e-mail: M.Castelle.1@warwick.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2021 1

J. Roberge and M. Castelle (eds.), The Cultural Life of Machine
Learning, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56286-1_1
2 J. ROBERGE AND M. CASTELLE

are breathlessly playing a game of catch-up with each other—only exac-

erbates this tension. While the topic of AI has attracted interest from
social scientists and humanists in the past, the recent conjunction of ML
hype, massive allocations of technological and financial resources, internal
scientific controversies about the validity of connectionist approaches,
and discourses about hopes and fears all mark the rise to prominence
of twenty-first-century machine learning and deep learning (DL) as a
paradigmatically novel sociotechnical phenomenon. In a nutshell, what we
are witnessing is nothing less than an epistemic shock or what Pasquinelli
(2015) has referred to as an epistemic “trauma.” For scholars of cultural
life—such as sociologists, media scholars, and those affiliated with science
and technology studies—this situation forces us to ask by what methods
we can possibly stay up to date with these radical transformations‚ while
also being able to provide commentary of some significance. How, espe-
cially, would it be possible to make sense of the present challenges posed
by ML, but in a way that allows for a more complex (and indeed
“deeper”) understanding currently unavailable to ML’s practitioners? In
this introduction, we want to wager that it may be more productive
to embrace these tensions than to attempt to fully resolve them. For
instance, it is certainly possible to be technically precise while proposing
perspectives quite distant from the computing sciences—the different
chapters assembled here are a testimony to this—and it is certainly
possible to engage with these technologies and their many subtleties while
remaining focused (or, indeed, “trained”) on the more historical and
cultural if not mythical aspects of their deployment. The list of dualities
does not stop there, of course. ML and modern AI models are simul-
taneously agents for epistemology and, increasingly, ontology; that is to
say, they are a way of knowing as well as of being in the world. They are
part of a discourse as much as they are a mode of action, and they are a
description of the world and its social composition as much as a prescrip-
tion of what it ought to be. In turn, the study of machine learning must
be aware of this epistemological/ontological tension and be willing to
carefully navigate it.
It should perhaps not be surprising that this is not the first time
that critical reflections on artificial intelligence emerging from the social
sciences have had to fight for their legitimacy. In the mid-1980s, Bloom-
field’s “The Culture of Artificial Intelligence” (1987)—a work today
almost entirely forgotten—forcefully argued against the “exclusion of
 1 TOWARD AN END-TO-END SOCIOLOGY … 3

sociological questions from any serious examination of AI” and the “fore-
closure of sociology to questions of social impact” (pp. 63–67). Around
the same time, a better-remembered piece by Woolgar (1985) raised the
question: “why not a sociology of machines?”—primarily to indicate that
such an endeavor must go beyond simply examining the impacts of tech-
nology and attend to its genesis and social construction. What these kinds
of positions had in common was a commitment to develop a more holistic
approach, in which no aspect of these so-called intelligent technologies
would be left out of consideration; so we see in Schwartz (1989) the idea
that a proper sociology of AI could ask “under what conditions and in
what settings is a model deemed adequate?,” and in Forsythe’s (1993)
work the argument that “engineers’ assumptions have some unintended
negative consequences for their practice, for the systems they build, and
(potentially at least) the broader society” (p. 448). Fast forward some
30-plus years, and the need to make social-scientific discourse on what
one might call “21st-century” AI both socially pertinent and accurate has
returned with a vengeance. If we consider the sociotechnical genesis of
these techniques as “upstream” and their eventual social impact as “down-
stream,” then we can see critics like Powles and Nissenbaum (2018), who
write of the “seductive diversion of ‘solving’ bias in artificial intelligence,”
as warning against an overemphasis on upstream engineering dilemmas
without considering how “scientific fairness” comes to be deployed in
practice; and we can see Roberge, Senneville, and Morin (2020) discus-
sion of regulatory bodies such as Quebec’s Observatory on the Social
Impact of AI (OBVIA) as warning of a corresponding overemphasis on
“downstream” social impact, which does not see that said social impact is
explicitly entangled with the development of the commercial AI research
power center known as the Montréal hub.
As a corrective, we want to propose the need for what could be
called—with a wink and a nod to deep learning methodology—an end-to-
end sociology of contemporary ML/AI, which understands this explicit
entanglement of “upstream” and “downstream” and instead trains itself
on the entire sociotechnical and political process of modern machine
learning from genesis to impact and back again. In this, we find ourselves
in line with scholars like Sloane and Moss (2019) who have recently
argued, for an audience of AI practitioners, that it is necessary to over-
come “AI’s social science deficit” by “leveraging qualitative ways of
knowing the sociotechnical world.” Such a stance justifies the value of
historical, theoretical, and political research at both an epistemological
4 J. ROBERGE AND M. CASTELLE

level of how AI/ML comes to produce and justify knowledge, and at

an ontological level of understanding the essence of these technologies
and how we can come to coexist with them in everyday practice. But
to do so requires an epistemic step that ML practitioners have not fully
accepted themselves, namely, to insist on a definition of ML/AI as a “co-
production requiring the interaction of social and technical processes”
(Holton & Boyd, 2019, p. 2). Radford and Joseph (2020), for their
part, have proposed a comparable framework that they call “theory in,
theory out,” in which “social theory helps us solve problems arising at
every step in the machine learning for social data pipeline” (p. 2; emphasis
added). These perspectives represent threads that weave in and out of the
chapters in this book as they address machine learning and artificial intelli-
gence from differing historical, theoretical, and political perspectives from
their epistemic genesis to sociotechnical implementations to social impact.
These chapters can be seen to represent a different attempt to bring these
proposals into reality with empirically motivated thinking and research.
To engage with machine learning requires, to some extent, under-
standing better what these techniques and technologies are about in the
first place for its practitioners. What are the baseline assumptions and
technical-historical roots of ML? What ways of knowing do these assump-
tions promote? While it is not uncommon to read that ML represents a
“black boxed” technology by both insiders and outsiders, it is nonetheless
important to stress how counterproductive such a claim can be, in part
because of its bland ubiquity. Yes, ML can be difficult to grasp due to
its apparent (if not always actual) complexity of large numbers of model
parameters, the rapid pace of its development in computer science, and
the array of sub-techniques it encompasses (whether they be the genres of
learning, such as supervised, unsupervised, self-supervised, or the specific
algorithmic models such as decision trees, support vector machines, or
neural networks). As of late, different scholars have tried to warn that the
“widespread notion of algorithms as black boxes may prevent research
more than encouraging it” (Bucher, 2016, p. 84; see also Burrell, 2016;
Geiger, 2017; Sudmann, 2018). Hence, the contrary dictum—“do not
fear the black box” (Bucher, 2016, p. 85)—encourages us to deconstruct
ML’s fundamental claims about itself, while simultaneously paying special
attention to its internal logics and characteristics and, to some degree,
aligning social scientists with AI researchers who are also genuinely
curious about the apparent successes and potentially serious limitations of
today’s ML models (even if their tactics are limited to the quantitative).
 1 TOWARD AN END-TO-END SOCIOLOGY … 5

While the difficulty of knowing what’s going on inside a neural network

should not be seen as a conspiracy, it is the case that certain ideological
underpinnings can be exposed by determining what aspects of the “black
box” are in fact known and unknown to practitioners.
One fundamental characteristic of contemporary machine learning,
which one can best observe in the “connectionist machine” (Cardon,
Cointet, & Mazières, 2018) of deep learning, is precisely this pragmatic
and model-centric culture. It is with deep learning that we can most easily
recognize as social scientists that we have moved from an analytical world
of the algorithm to the world of the model, a relatively inert, sequential,
and/or recurrent structure of matrices and vectors (which nevertheless
is, of course, trained in a processual manner). For DL practitioners, the
only truly important “algorithm” dates from the mid-nineteenth century:
namely, Cauchy’s (1847) method of gradient descent. Much of the rest
of deep learning’s logic often seems more art than science: a grab-bag
of techniques that researchers must confront and overcome with practice
and for which there can be no formal guidance. These are the notable
“Tricks of the Trade” (Orr & Müller, 1998) that the previous marginal-
ized wave of neural network research came to circulate among themselves;
today they refer, for example, to the “hyperparameters” that exist outside
both the model and the algorithm and yet crucially determine its success
(in often unpredictable ways). This relates to a second fundamental char-
acteristic: the flexibility and dynamic, cybernetic quality of contemporary
machine learning. Training a model on millions of training examples is
a genetic process, during which the model develops over time. But it is
not just the model that develops, but the social world of which the
model is but a part; every deep learning researcher is, more so than in
other sciences, attuned to each other and each other’s models, because an
innovation in one field (such as machine translation) might be profitably
transduced to new domains (such as computer vision).
As we can see, it is not just the training processes of contemporary
machine learning that randomly explores to find a good local minimum
(e.g., using backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent): the entire
sociotechnical and cultural endeavor of ML mirrors that mechanism.
“Machine learning is not a one-shot process of building a dataset and
running a learner,” Domingos notes, “but rather an iterative process of
running the learner, analyzing the result, modifying the data and/or
the learner and repeating” (Domingos, 2012, as cited by Mackenzie,
6 J. ROBERGE AND M. CASTELLE

2015). That the same can be said of both the field’s model architec-
tures and the field in general reflects the self -referentiality that is a
third fundamental characteristic of contemporary machine learning, in
which machine learning practitioners, implicitly or explicitly, see their own
behavior in terms of the epistemology of their techniques. This inward
quality was also found among the researchers of an earlier generation of
AI, who saw the height of intelligence as the chess-playing manipulator of
symbolic mathematical equations (Cohen-Cole, 2005); today we should
be unsurprised that a reinforcement-learning agent with superhuman skill
at various Atari video games (Mnih et al., 2013) was considered by some
practitioners as a harbinger of machine superintelligence. This represents
the logic of a closed community in which the only known social theory is
game theory (Castelle, 2020).
Machines using supervised learning to recognize images, speech, and
text are not only connectionist, but “inductive machines” by nature
(Cardon et al., 2018). ML (and especially DL) methodologies hold firm
in this grounded approach where reality emerges from data and knowl-
edge emerges from observation, and the assumptions are often (if not
always) straightforward: i.e., that there must be self-evident, objective
ties between what is “out there” and what is to be modeled and moni-
tored. These inductivist views, in other words, offer a kind of realism
and pragmatism that is only reinforced by the migration of architec-
tures for image recognition—such as the famous ImageNet-based models,
which try to identify 1000 different types of objects in bitmap photos
(Krizhevsky, Sutskever, & Hinton 2012)—to the more agentive world
of real-time surveillance systems (Stark, 2019) or autonomous vehicles
(Stilgoe, 2018). These embodied, real-world systems retain the ideology
of simpler models, where to “recognize” is to decipher differences in
pixels, to “see” is to detect edges, textures, and shapes and to ultimately
pair an object with a preexisting label: this is a leopard, this is a container
ship, and so on. Instead, these core principles of image recognition have
remained unchallenged—namely that the task at hand is one of projecting
the realm of the visual onto a flat taxonomy of concepts. And this is where
signs of vulnerability inevitably appear: isn’t it all too easy to be adequate
in this domain? Crawford and Paglen (2019) have notably raised this issue
of the fundamental ambiguity of the visual world by noting that “the
automated interpretation of images is an inherently social and political
project, rather than a purely technical one.”
 1 TOWARD AN END-TO-END SOCIOLOGY … 7

Such an argument nicely sums up what we meant earlier for the

necessity of the social sciences to engage with machine learning on its
own epistemological grounds. The idea is not to deny the possibility
of reflexivity within ML cultures, but to instead relentlessly question
the robustness of said reflexivity, especially outside of narrow technical
contexts. The debate is thus on, and at present finds itself to be an inter-
esting echo of the argument that the rise of big data should be associated
with an “end of theory” (Anderson, 2008). Then, the term “theory”
referred to traditional statistical models and scientific hypotheses, which
would be hypothetically rendered irrelevant in the face of massive data
sets and millions of fine-grained correlations (boyd & Crawford, 2012).
But instead of big data’s crisis of empiricism, in the case of machine
learning we have—as we have suggested above—a crisis of epistemology
and ontology, as ML models become more present and take on ever more
agency in our everyday lives. At present, machine learning culture is held
together by what Elish and boyd (2018) call “epistemological duct tape,”
and the different chapters in this book are, in part, a testimony to this
marked instability.

How to Categorize Meanings

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the level of hype associ-
ated with ML and AI in the past decade, whether it be claims about
how the latest developments represent a “tsunami” (Manning, 2015), a
“revolution” (Sejnowski, 2018), or—to be more critical—something of
a myth (Natale & Ballatore, 2020; Roberge et al., 2020) or a magical
tale (Elish & boyd, 2018). This is what we intend to capture in saying
that ML has developed a cultural life of its own. The question, of
course, is to understand how this is possible; and on closer inspection,
it seems apparent that what has allowed ML to become such a mean-
ingful endeavor is its claim to meaning itself . Once one looks, one begins
to see it everywhere: from Mark Zuckerberg noting that “most of [Face-
book’s] AI research is focused on understanding the meaning of what
people share” (Zuckerberg, 2015; emphasis added) to Yoshua Bengio for
whom the conversation is “about computers gradually making sense of the
world around us by observation” (Bengio, 2016). Similar quotes can be
found regarding specific tasks like object recognition, in which the goal
is “to translate the meaning of an image” (LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton,
8 J. ROBERGE AND M. CASTELLE

2015) and/or to develop a “fuller understanding of the 3D as well as the

semantic visual world” (Li quoted in Knight, 2016).
This latent desire to “solve” the question of meaning within the
formerly deeply symbol-centric world of artificial intelligence here mani-
fests itself as claims of an unfolding conquest, but not everyone is
convinced; Mitchell (2018), for example, shows how contemporary AI
time and again crashes into the “barrier of meaning.” Mitchell argues
that this is because AI’s associationist training methodologies (a) do not
have “commonsense knowledge” of the world and how other actors in
the world behave, and (b) are unable to generalize to develop more
abstract concepts and to “flexibly adapt … concepts to new situations.”
We would argue that a better distinction might be between decontextu-
alized meaning, i.e., the sense-relations that seem to be carried by signs
independent of context, and pragmatic reference, which is largely depen-
dent on context (Wertsch, 1983). It is with the former that machine
learning excels—for example in the “sorting things out” of classifica-
tion models (Bowker & Star, 1999), and in the sense-relations seemingly
captured by word embeddings (Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, &
Dean, 2013)—but with the latter, models can only struggle to accommo-
date pragmatic reference by decontextualizing as much input as possible
(one will notice that so-called natural language processing has far more
to do with decontextualized sentences of written text than with real-
world utterances between two or more humans). ML practitioners, in
general, tend to have a limited sense of what “context” is, in contrast to
the term’s use by anthropologists to indicate how the sociocultural situa-
tions in which communicative utterances occur affect and transform their
meaning. For ML, this insatiable effort to calculate meaning by relent-
lessly making so-called context out of co-text (Lyons, 1995, p. 271),
however, tends to opens the door to existing processes of commensu-
ration (Espeland & Stevens, 1998), and does not tend to any increased
reflexivity on behalf of its researchers and developers about the nature of
communication, meaning, and even learning. Social scientists and philoso-
phers—especially those concerned with hermeneutics, as we will describe
below—will recognize the epistemological and ontological issues in the
predominance of such a myopic worldview.
What is left after these processes of decontextualization and entextu-
alization (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) are the materials for the numerous
classification tasks at which modern machine learning excels. In the social-
scientific literature it is Mackenzie (2017) who has discussed these models
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Note for a time
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Title: Note for a time capsule

Author: Edward Wellen

Illustrator: Richard Kluga

Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71869]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTE FOR A

TIME CAPSULE ***
NOTE FOR A TIME CAPSULE

By EDWARD WELLEN

Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA

Yes, I know, the rating services probably never call

you up. But they call me up twenty times a week!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity March 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I take it you sociologists living in what to me is the future (I take it
there's a future, a future with a place for sociologists) will note the
unlikely revolution in taste now going on. For your information, then,
here's why the rating services are reflecting a sudden upping from
the pelvis to the cortex—just in case this will have become a cause
for wild surmise.
You probably know what the rating services are ("were," to you; but I
don't want to tense this document up). Most people nowadays don't
know about the rating services; they know of them.
Every so often I hear someone say darkly, "I don't know about those
polls. I've never had a call from them and no one I know has ever
had a call from them."
I keep quiet or mumble something noncommittal. I could say,
truthfully, "I do know about those polls. They ring me up more than
twenty times a week." I could say that but I don't.
Not so much because I don't want to seem a crackpot or a liar as
because I don't want to spoil a good thing. Or at least what I think is
a good thing—and for the time being what I think is a good thing is
what the world thinks is a good thing.
Now, in order for you to get the picture you must understand that the
New York metropolitan area fashions the literary and musical fads of
the United States and the United States by example and by
infiltration via writings and movies and recordings fashions the fads
of the world. And the New York metropolitan area goes by the
opinions I frame.
It probably seems strange to you that I, in any amassing of statistics
merely one digit in the neighborhood of the decimal point, can claim
to exert such far-reaching influence.
But I've seen much the same sort of thing in my work as a CPA.
Someone possessing relatively few shares in a holding company
may exercise an inordinate amount of power over the national
economy.
An analogous set of operations makes it possible for me to be an
esthetic shot of digitalis in the body politic. That's why Bartok's
Mikrokosmos is at this writing the top tune and why archaeology
professor Dr. Loob is high man on the polls with his TV show Dig
This! and why the world has taken such a turn that you may very
likely be calling this the Day of the Egghead.
But you're most likely asking at this point, "Why, in the name of
statistical probability, did this character get so many calls when so
many people got none?" And your next thought is, "Or did he? Was
he a paranoiac?"
Here's my answer to your second question. I'm certainly not
imagining any of this. You're bound to come upon some signs of
these times and know what I've said about the revolution in taste is
true. Otherwise there'd be no point in my setting this down or in your
reading it.
The hard part is to convince you that the rest of it—about my role—is
true. The trouble is there's nothing about me personally that would
help me convince you. There's nothing uncommon about me except
that my tastes were previously uncommon.
As I mentioned, I'm a CPA. I live in a suburb of New York City. I have
an office in the city. I'm really semi-retired and take care of only a few
old business friends, so my listing in the Manhattan phone directory
doesn't include the terms CPA or ofc. I have a commutation book
and the usual gripes against the NYNH&H. As a matter of fact I'm
writing this while commuting and you'll have to blame not me but the
roadbed and the rolling stock for any of this you may find difficult to
decipher, for really I have a very neat handwriting. Although there's
no noticeable pressure of work I stay on at my office after the girl's
quitting time. (She still chews gum, but all day yesterday she was
humming Bartok's Mikrokosmos.) I balance books until the line at the
bottom of the column becomes a bongo board on a decimal point
and then I squeeze my eyes and shake my head and go home.
I live alone. I'm a widower. I have one daughter. Thank goodness
she's grown, married, and living in a place of her own, so there's no
one to tie up the phone. I've given up frequenting the haunts of my
old cronies. Though I miss their argumentative companionship I take
comfort in the fact that I'm furthering our common interests. I don't
give a hang that my lawn needs mowing; let the wind violin through
the grass—I'm staying near the phone.
It's between six and seven in the evening at the office and between
eight and midnight at home that I receive the calls.
That brings me to your first question—about why I consistently get
so many calls when so many people get none.
Let me make it clear at once that even if the polls were buyable or
fixable, and I'm not suggesting they are, I haven't the means to buy
or the electronic knowledge to fix supposedly random calls. Besides,
I'm fairly ethical.
Then what's the answer?
Naturally I've given this phenomenon more than a bit of thought, and
I've formulated a theory to explain—at least to my satisfaction—why
what's happening's happening. I believe the drawing power of my
phone numbers inheres in the nature of number.
Now don't go getting hot under the collar—if you're still wearing
collars—before you hear me out.
I'm not talking about numerology or any such mystical hocus-pocus.
I'm talking about the psychopathology of everyday life. That's what's
skewing and skewering the law of probabilities.
I know this demands explaining, so I'll be specific.
Apart from these calls from the rating services, I keep receiving calls
on my home phone from people who set out to dial a certain
undertaker—I beg his pardon, funeral director. We have the same
exchange, in fact his number differs from mine only in that the first of
his last four digits is a zero while my corresponding one is a nine.
Of course by now you've put your finger on it. These people are
dialing the under—funeral director because, in the current
colloquialism, someone's number's up. They misdial because they're
unconsciously saying nein to the zero of death.
I've analyzed both my home phone number and my office phone
number in this fashion, figuring out what their components connote
singly and as gestalts. And I can see why these fortuitous
combinings command attention, why these numbers leap out of the
directory pages right at you. Privately I call such a number a
common denominator with a way of accreting its numerator.
I hope you're not laughing at me.
After all, when you remember what number is, what's happening
follows naturally. Number's a language we use to blaze our way
through the wood of reality. Without number we couldn't say what is
more or less probable, we couldn't signpost our path. But using
number is like trying to detect the emission of a photon without
having to receive that photon. The difficulty lies in trying to get
number at least one remove from the font of all language—the
human mind. Possibly we'll come closest to order, be at one with
reality, when we can order number—at the level of statistical
probability—to be truly random, at one with chaos.
At any rate, there you have it. I'd like to go into greater detail but I'm
afraid to.
Before my phone numbers up and atted 'em I was content merely to
tune out the noisome and the fulsome and sigh to myself, "That's life.
You ask for beer and get water."
That is, I thought I was content.
It's only now that I'm getting beer with an egg in it that I realize how
passionately I hated the way things were and how passionately I'd
hate to have to go back to that way.
I don't know how long this phenomenon will go on but while it lasts I
mean to make the most of it.
I unashamedly enjoy watching the expression of bewildered
enthusiasm on everyone's face. That expression is there because
everyone listens to and looks at what the polls tell him is popular and
because everyone tells himself he likes it because "everyone" likes
it.
But in some respects my feelings are more uncertain. I'm glad and at
the same time sorry for the longhair musicians. It seems more
embarrassing than pleasing to them to find themselves suddenly the
idols of bobby-soxers. I try not to think of Stravinsky barricading
himself against the adulating adolescents souveniring him to his
underwear.
As you can see, I've had to harden my heart. (It's tempting to say I've
had to become number.) And I intend to be even more ruthless.
I'm planning, for example, to place on the Hit Parade Dhaly's
Concerto in Alpha Wave for Oscillograph and Woodwinds.
That's why I'm being exceedingly careful to leave nothing to chance.
Though this document is sort of a hostage to fortune, I'm taking into
account the possibility that I might lose it while commuting and that it
might fall into the hands of some unsympathetic contemporary. So
I'm not writing down my phone numbers or my name. I want to keep
the lines clear for the pollsters.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTE FOR A
TIME CAPSULE ***

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